Final Drawn Illustration

This is my final drawn illustration which has been completed and includes a range of materials/medias and a variety of colours. Firstly for the background I decided to go for a light blue colour to represent the sky as my bug is one which would fly due to its wings, For the body I used red and blue acrylic paint applied with a smaller paintbrush to create the simple striped pattern, I chose acrylic paint for this section because when working in close quarters I feel that acrylic paint is the best option as you don't have to worry about smudging the paint when you move to another section as the properties of acrylic paint means that it dries extremely quick. On top of the acrylic paint I added a piece of black tissue paper which I then covered in bleach using a paint brush multiple times to attempt to get this as translucent as possible which didn't exactly work as the right side of the paper stayed dark for an unknown reason making it difficult to see what it underneath. I expected the whole body to look like the small section at the top where you can easily see through the paper and see the pattern underneath, I added the tissue paper and bleach because I actually wanted to dull down the body colours slightly so that it didn't take away from the wings which I wanted to be the main feature of this bug. For the top wings background colour I used a diluted pink watercolour ro create a lighter tone but it had to be dark enough so that you couldn't see the blue background through the wings, I initially wanted to use the resist technique as it worked so well on the sample but as the background was painted first the stripes on the wings would have been the exact same as the background which is something that I wanted to avoid and I also didn't want to risk putting tape down because that then has a chance to rip the paper when it is being pulled up and that could ruin the entire piece. To overcome this cut out strips of paper of equal length using scissors and then had to cut them to fit the curvature of the wings, I then got blue Indian ink and a willow stick, I dipped the willow into the ink and then rolled to willow stick up the paper (re-dipping the stick when the colour began to fade) and repeated this process 4 times to create these patterns. I deem that this was a favourable idea because each stripe looks the same but has slight differences and when dried the colour that the Indian ink produces is very bright and easy on the eye. On the bottom wings I painted the base wing colour by using a paintbrush with non-diluted pink watercolour to create a dark tone so that the two wing colours were distinctive from one another. Once the paint was dry I then used paper towels to cover the image and only kept a specific segment uncovered which allowed me to use a toothbrush and blue watercolour paint in a controlled fashion to create the two straight and symmetrical lines with a very high depth of colour. At the bottom of the wings I applied yellow acrylic paint in vertical lines with a paintbrush trying to keep each wing looking similar with the height and width of each line, this was a last minute aspect that I added to the illustration and I personally feel that it was a mistake but I thought that the bottom of the wings looked too bare and this was the only idea that I could think of at the time and if I did this illustration again I wouldn't add this design feature. For the head I simply used a paintbrush to paint it red with acrylic paint because since the head is such a small aspect of the bug I decided to not try and add finer detail because I didn't want to ruin the over all piece on something that would have been so minor, however if I did this again I would have added some sort of eyes to the head so that the bug looked more relateable and friendly to children and their parents. Finally I also changed the appearance of the antennas as I had a great deal of space left above the head area and the antennas that had had originally drawn were smaller in comparison and also lacked the detail that the antennas I chose to go with offer.